The way we were…
Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.
L.M. Montgomery
Many of us have Memory ‘Apps’ on our phones that pop up with reminders of celebrations or notable events that we recorded on Social Media over the years gone by. Of course, these tend to be momentous occasions. All are happy. Photos full of smiling faces. More mundane or less happy times go unrecorded unless, like me, you keep a journal. Happy or sad, good, or bad, my journals are a chronicle of ordinary life.
I have in the past returned to long remembered places to ‘celebrate’ past events in my life. I spent a day revisiting some of my old London haunts, on the thirtieth anniversary of my move to live and work there. Those once familiar places had already changed in significant ways. That was sixteen years ago, so no doubt further change has happened.
The Civil Service Hostel which had been my ‘home’ for the first months in London had become what looked at least from the outside much more upmarket flats. My ‘local’ pub had lost the homeliness I remembered. Replaced with a tourist-centric atmosphere. At least it was still open. My first place of work was now part of Kings College. In the Bullring, as we called the ‘safe’ area where my colleagues and I used to congregate following bomb warnings from the IRA, stood an Imax cinema. Even in the place Buster Edwards, the Great Train robber, had his flower stall, there stood a mobile burger bar.
A few years later, as one of the ‘celebrations’ of my 50th birthday, I returned to Newcastle for a couple of days to try to rediscover the places I frequented as a teenager. Other than St James Park all seemed to have disappeared or been ‘repurposed’. Even the football ground was much transformed. All the schools I attended had long gone. The space they occupied now housing estates.
To celebrate my retirement last year, it was back to London and this time to the pubs in which I misspent quite a bit of my youth. Unlike my schools, they are all still standing. Beer wins out over Education. There was the Wellington in Waterloo Road, in which I spent many a Friday afternoon in the mid-seventies playing pool and consuming beer. The pub has a new lick of paint and the pool table is no more but it’s still the place I remember. Then there was the Hole in the Wall opposite Waterloo Railway station in which I celebrated my first promotion. That pub doesn’t seem to have changed at all in fifty years. In fact, judging by its ‘stickiness’ they still have the same carpet! The King’s Arms in Roupell Street also doesn’t seem to have changed since first built in the 1800s never mind when I was a regular. Unlike the clubs, cafes, and greasy spoons I recall, the pubs have soldiered on through recession, city planning and the like. One does wonder whether COVID may spell their death knell.
It wasn’t just pubs, clubs, and cafes I frequented in my youth. There were also visits to the likes of the National Gallery and the Tate (there was only one of those back then). At least these have stood, unaltered, in defiance of time. Over the decades, I’ve enjoyed the tranquillity of these Art Galleries and can still do so today. Especially at quiet times. Such visits have always had a calming effect. They offer the peace that others might find in a place of worship. When feeling emotionally turbulent, I’ve always found the atmosphere in an Art Gallery gives me space and time to reflect. I don’t so much look at what are now familiar paintings but share their company like old friends.
I’ll always enjoy an occasional day of reminiscence. But those occasions also reinforce how time moves inexorably on. I feel it’s essential to walk the roads of our memories now and again. However, we must not linger too long as to paraphrase L P Hartley, the past is a foreign country; we did things differently there.
Take care all.
